With an interest in video game design, Kage Brown was enthusiastic when he heard about the robotics challenge in his fifth-grade class at Washington Township Elementary.
He figured he could learn rudimentary coding skills that he could adapt when teaching himself how to design games.
“You can actually make really cool stuff at home,” said Kage, 10.
For the two-week project, his class began with a simple objective: Use an iPad to program a robotic ball to move in a square or triangle.
As the project took shape, their interests grew and some of her 18 students expanded the idea to build ramps and have it move through a homemade obstacle course, said fifth-grade teacher Jeanine Krieger.
“Our main goal isn’t to make them better gamers,” Krieger said. “They are concluding that it takes some experimenting and that things don’t (always) go perfectly. Sometimes high-ability kids don’t like to fail.”
The goal is to use the popular introduction of robotics to encourage students to adopt the trial-and-error mindset that is the basis of scientific experimentation.
While in class, Kage and partner Porter Hoagland, 11, managed their first successful trial run after a few attempts.
Beginning in May, Krieger’s class is scheduled to introduce it to fourth-graders and help them pick up the programming, Krieger said.
“I think for one thing, they learn patience and working together,” Krieger said. “They don’t seem to be as easily frustrated” if something doesn’t work out.
“We started out almost being a remote control toy,” she said. The biggest surprise was to “see what they were able to come up with.”
Twitter: @meredithcolias
